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A Murderous Talent

Serial killers are localists. They murder within their chosen patch — a red-light district, a city quarter — and tend not to travel beyond it. Changing location means recoding the method; learning a new vernacular of murder. It also increases the risk of detection: an out-of-towner is more likely to be remembered from a crime scene.

Jack Unterweger, the subject of John Leake’s bleak book, had no anxieties about being remembered, nor about exporting his method. For this eerily charming dandy wasn’t just a tourist but a murderer, who killed 12 women in four countries. Visiting Los Angeles in 1991 — ostensibly to research a radio program on prostitution — he dressed as a cross between a cowhand and a Mississippi preacher (white snakeskin boots and a white coat emblazoned with a hibiscus). By day he rode along with the Los Angeles Police Department on a journalist’s ticket, observing its method and its milieu. By night he strangled prostitutes to death, fashioning intricate nooses from their bras, which allowed him to throttle his victims before tying off the ligatures at enormous tension.

Unterweger’s idiosyncrasies stand out even within the idiosyncratic world of serial killers. Born in Austria in 1950, he was imprisoned at age 24 for the murder of a young German woman. While incarcerated, he began to write poems, plays and self-refashioning autobiographical novels. One novel, “Purgatory,” was a best seller. Unterweger became the darling of Vienna’s radical-chic set, who discovered in his literature the proof of a reformed man.

A lobbying campaign began for his release. Writers, artists, journalists and politicians — mostly Socialists — agitated for a pardon. Among them was Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian playwright who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Alfred Kolleritsch, editor of the magazine Manuskripte, went to the Stein prison to hear Unterweger read from his work. “He was so tender,” Kolleritsch later recalled, “and at that moment we decided we had to get him pardoned.” Unterweger became the poster boy of successful rehabilitation: his story was told, Leake notes, “as a triumph of the individual over all the social and political pathologies into which he’d been born.”

On May 23, 1990, having served the minimum possible sentence, Unterweger was paroled. In the 18 months following his release, he became an Austrian celebrity, lionized by literarniks (literary intellectuals) and promis (prominent people) alike. He gave readings throughout Austria and Germany, he staged his plays and he worked as a reporter for the ORF — Austria’s equivalent of the BBC. He also killed 11 women.

Photo

Jack Unterweger posing as a dandy from the 20s.Credit
www.studio-ahermann.at

Unterweger’s modus operandi was one of brute violence garnished with ritual. He would pick up a prostitute late at night and drive her to an out-of-town spot — a wooded road or a parking lot. Consensual sex would follow, often involving restraint of some kind: handcuffs or ties. Then the mood would change. Bound and terrified, the victim would be forced to leave the car and walk into the darkness. Any resistance prompted violence: several of the victims had puncture wounds to their buttocks, caused by Unterweger’s stiletto heels. Most had suffered blunt-force trauma to the head and face. Death, when it finally came, was by strangulation. Each body was then partly buried, usually with a scattering of leaves or a fascia of branches.

When news of the first killings came to light, Unterweger — in an act of astonishing nerve — established himself as a key journalist covering the case. He interviewed Vienna’s chief of police and produced a series of radio broadcasts and newspaper essays on the subject. It would take nine months before an arrest warrant was issued for Unterweger.

How did he get away with it for so long? Largely because he was a brilliant manipulator of people. An emotional chameleon, Unterweger sensed what a person needed to find in him and simulated it instantly. So powerful was this ability that while in prison, he may even have persuaded the parents of his first victim to finance his education. Women were especially susceptible to his gamin, pitiable charm, and he maintained dozens of relationships simultaneously. When he was finally being tried for his crimes, 20 women sat together in the courthouse’s public galleries, weeping: mistresses, lovers and admirers, all convinced of Unterweger’s innocence.

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Leake, an American translator and writer who spent time in Vienna for six years, has written a finely scrupulous account of Unterweger’s repugnant career. “Entering Hades” does not have the flaring intensity of Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel or the heavy, heady atmosphere of Mailer’s true-crime reconstructions. Its considerable accomplishments are structural and archival, rather than stylistic. The book is split into 91 short chapters, each of which presents a splinter episode from Unterweger’s life. Leake has spent years interviewing those involved with the Unterweger case and combing the millions of words that it generated, both juridical and journalistic. As a result, he is able to tweezer away the layers of Unterweger’s deceptions. Most important, he seems to be impervious to Unterweger’s charm. There is no evidence here of a fascinated respect for this vile man, only of a fascinated curiosity. Leake shares the attitude of an F.B.I. agent who testified against Unterweger and remembered him as a “presence ... a malevolent thoroughbred.”

The specter of a parallel case hovers around this book: that of Jack Henry Abbott, the convicted murderer-turned-author, whose parole from prison was lobbied for by Norman Mailer. Just weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed a waiter to death. Leake chooses not to invoke the Abbott case, but the affinities are multiple: radical-chic intervention, leading to early release, leading to recidivism. “This guy isn’t a murderer, he’s an artist!” Mailer notoriously declared of Abbott, as if the two vocations were mutually exclusive.

Abbott ended up hanging himself in his cell, using a shoelace and a sheet. Unterweger also turned his skills as a noose-man upon himself. On the night of June 29, 1994 — after his conviction and sentencing to life in prison — he improvised a noose from a trouser drawstring and a leash of thin wire. He was found dead at 3:40 a.m. Because he died before the court could hear an appeal, Unterweger’s guilty verdict was not legally binding.

John Leake has written the definitive book — dispassionate, superbly detailed — on Jack Unterweger. Of its subject, no more now needs saying, beyond the words with which Leake ends his story, citing the wife of the Vienna detective who spent years unraveling the case: “Thank God, he’s dead.”